The anorexic brain

I rewatched this yesterday and cried. She gets it, she understands. She clearly shows how our brains work differently and why everything about eating is distressing. She has a wonderful way to demonstrate the noise in our head when we eat and what happens when we don’t. It’s only 18 minutes but the best 18 minutes I’ve spent on a video in a very long time. She also tells the truth about what happens to our obsessive thought when we go into treatment and how they actually increase.

I’ve been commenting and saying that mine have diminished slightly after months of eating but I’m not sure that is true. I’m going in to see my nutritionist today and to explain that the yoga he is letting me do is, in fact, over-exercising. Instead of cobras I do pushups, LOTS of pushups, as well as converting all the other positions into a 30 minute solid functional training workout disguised as yoga. I suspect this is why my thoughts have been quieter. I’m getting my exercise fix. Over exercising triggers other behaviors so you can see how this plays out.

This morning I chose not to do yoga. Guess what happened? I cried and cried. I needed it, I wanted it… that is a problem. So if I go back to no exercise I’m fairly confident the cacophony of obsessive thoughts will return.

Another reason why I cried was that Laura Hill offers hope. Yes, I’ll rewatch it. Food has to be the number one priority right now, it must! I’ve been over-scheduling myself and in truth, that just gives me yet another excuse to miss meals. My therapist said that I have to think of myself like a baby. Babies need specific regular feeding times. Everything else has to be scheduled around that. I need to let go of some of the things I’m doing, even if they are fun things, and make my food schedule first. I also have to go back to setting my alarm for every 2-3 hours, depending on the meal, to make sure I don’t let time go by.

If I continue I’ll end up back in treatment. I have to make a change and I have to do it now. I have some huge triggers coming up and I need to have a good number of compliant days under my belt before facing those.

I’m so lucky that I ended up in a program that actively uses and teaches her findings. My nutritionist continually asserts food as medicine and explains the data, through body comps, that prove how my behavior daily damages my body. That’s why I’m planning on continuing with him even after iOP.